Research universities have a long history as primary contributors to significant advancements in medicine and public health. This project addresses the question of the integrity of university research (with a focus on biomedical fields) by identifying the way research institutions deal with conflict of interest (COI) at the level of the institutions and their trustees. The composition of boards of university trustees and interlocks among university trustees' boards may contribute to COI and create a challenge to research integrity by compromising stewardship. Challenges to stewardship are increasingly important in light of growing emphasis on commercialization. Our overarching hypothesis is that all AAU universities exhibit some degree of systemic conflict of interest. Our specific working hypotheses are: 1. Trustees of AAU universities form a dense network that encompasses commercial biomedical interests. 2. Patent citation patterns show knowledge exchange between trustees' corporations and the universities of which they are stewards. 3. Patent profiles of trustees' corporations and the universities for which they have oversight responsibilities become increasingly similar over time. 4. Advisory boards of high opportunity biomedical nodes in centers, institutes, departments and colleges are directly and indirectly linked to the corporations on which university trustees sit. 5. Trustees engage in organizational learning through their dense network and develop similar COI policies over time, some of which are able to address issues presented by institutional and systemic conflict of interest. Our research plan calls for a mix of reinforcing quantitative and qualitative methods. Our data and analysis focus on changing linkages between trustees of the 62 AAU universities and non-university corporations that these trustees direct during the period 1996-2005. These data will be analyzed as a network to see if there are tight linkages through which practices and policies about conflict of interest can rapidly diffuse. Patterns of patent citations will be studied to see if there is knowledge exchange between trustees' corporations and universities. We expand this analysis by examining linkages between advisory boards of university biomedical nodes. In order to see how conflicts can best be managed, COI policies at the 62 AAU institutions will be gathered. An electronic database will be constructed that will permit analysis through various text mining techniques. As with our quantitative data, our qualitative data will represent longitudinal panel covering 1996-2005. The purpose of examining the COI policies is to identify policies that best address ways to manage institutional and systemic COI. [unreadable] [unreadable] [unreadable]